“The prison in Guantanamo is a flagrant violation of international and American laws,” said Lal Gul Lal, the head of the Afghanistan Human Rights Organization, an independent non-governmental organization. …

Some 600 prisoners are currently detained at Bagram, the main U.S. base in Afghanistan, Lal said, with more held at bases in Kandahar in the Afghan south and Khost in the east, some of them for long periods without charge.

A draft presidential executive order obtained by Reuters on Wednesday sets a one-year deadline to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo, where foreign terrorism suspects have been detained for years without trial. …

“It’s nothing. It’s a media stunt. After brutally and inhumanely treating inmates, now they’re pretending that they believe in justice and human rights,” Khalid, who now heads the Defense of Human Rights group, told Reuters.

6 thoughts on “Guantanamo and other US torture prisons”

Any attempt by Barack Obama to get European Union members to contribute more troops to the fight in Afghanistan is likely to face popular opposition, a new poll published Tuesday suggests.

Ahead of Obama’s inauguration as the United States’ first African-American president, the Financial Times published a poll suggesting the majority of people in Britain, Germany, France and Italy oppose deploying further troops.

About 60 percent of the respondents in Germany said they would not wish their government to send more troops under any circumstances.

In Britain, the second largest contributor to NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, 57 percent said they did not want to send any more troops.

In both France and Italy, 53 percent of people rejected sending more, leaving Spain the only country surveyed in the Harris poll where a majority was willing to consider further deployments.

The online poll of 6,299 adults was carried out across the five countries between January 8 and January 15.

It also revealed EU voters believe the economic crisis should be Obama’s priority, with fighting international terrorism relatively low down the list.

Obama has vowed to redeploy the military from Iraq and increase the pressure on a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.